Migrating .NET Core project.json to MSBuild format

Moving to VS2017 for .NET Core development

Posted by Christian Droulers on March 17, 2017

VS2017 is officially out and with it,
the new version of the .NET Core build system: MSBuild!

What? They’ve gone BACK? Yes. project.json was basically reimplementing everything already present
in MSBuild so they changed back. Don’t worry, they upgraded MSBuild to be much lighter and less
XML verbose. One of my test project has only 65 lines of XML and that includes some whitespace.

So migrating was a little bit of work since the migration tool works well for a vanilla
project.json, but I had a few customizations for StyleCop and others. Here’s a quick recap of
all the steps I had to go through and some caveats to keep in mind.